Upper Antelope Canyon

Author's Comments

You go for the beams. Everyone does. Between late March and early October, in the narrow window from about eleven to one, the sun finds the opening at the top and drops a column of light straight down through the canyon. The guides will toss handfuls of sand into the beam to make it visible, and for a moment you are standing inside something that does not feel like geology so much as theater. I will be honest about Upper Antelope. It is crowded. The tours run nose to tail through the canyon, and you are moving through a space barely wide enough for one person at a time with twenty other cameras trying to do the same thing you are. The photography-specific tours are worth the extra cost, not for the access exactly, but for the time. You need time in here. The walls do not photograph quickly. What I keep returning for is not the beams. It is the sandstone itself, the way the walls flow upward in long curving sheets and the light comes down already colored, bouncing from one surface to the next until what reaches you is the deep amber and rose that makes this canyon famous. Look up and the rock reads as fabric. Look at a single section of wall in detail and it reads as water. The whole place is a study in how stone can pretend to be something else. Shoot wide for the architecture. Shoot tight for the abstraction. The beams will give you the photograph you came for, and the walls will give you the photograph you did not know to ask for.

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